“Reception in a state of distraction”: Mindfulness and Media.

 

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.                 - Susan Sontag

In Ajitpal Singh’s Empty in me, a short experimental film (featured in the live film festival at www.cultureunplugged.com), we see two friends jump into the ocean, followed almost immediately by images of two fish swimming in a fishbowl. While the jump may represent a rite of passage for these two friends, as well as a transformative hydro-immersion experience (water symbolizing spiritual purification), juxtapositional images of the fishbowl reveal the underlying tensions beneath the anticipated pure state of mind that comes with spiritual liberation. In their description of the film, the producers write, “Ads lure us into a small world of material illusions, once inside, we feel it is the real world. It is actually a 'reel' world. We become like fish lying in a bowl near the ocean.”

The film, Empty in me, caters a commentary on the contemporary culture of excess (in terms of information, material plenitude, etc.) and society’s never-ending consumption of media. When senses are inundated by a deluge of information, what happens to the mind’s ability to be aware of its inner workings, as well as the external, physical surroundings? In the twenty-first century culture of Web 2.0 and social media, human thought and imagination have been transformed by the ever-widening circle of communication channels, as we move “in the direction of greater openness, greater socialization, greater cooperativeness” (Trilling 50). These profound cultural and social changes call for the reassessment of skills in order for people to be able to navigate the contemporary world of increased sociability and knowledge production, as well as the rethinking of critical mindfulness towards a better balance between online and offline terrains.

Photo from film 'Empty In Me' : Ajitpal Singh

In such a world where people are increasingly connected to one another via Internet technologies and new media such as social networking sites, e-mail, blogs, etc., where our consciousness is constantly bombarded by information, quietude and stillness of mind have become rarities. On one level, today’s digital age has afforded us greater socialization on national and global scales via Internet technologies.

As Marshall McLuhan had predicted almost half a decade ago, our world is becoming smaller, like a “global village.” On another level, however, as forms of communication, entertainment and learning migrate to the online world, we also distance ourselves further and further away from our “real” lives outside of the computer. To a certain extent, it is as Walter Benjamin wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: “the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.”  With the number of social media sites proliferating, the daily need for information feeds and for being “plugged in,” so to speak, has profound implications for our awareness of the self, as well as of the people and external world around us. With attention divided into different channels, websites, and programs, focusing on ourselves and reaching into the depths of the inner workings of our minds are becoming more and more difficult.

I do not deny that the digital age gives us great social and cultural benefits, outlets for social change and action, as well as incentives to be better connected with the world around us, but I ask that we take a step back and reexamine the contemporary practices of media consumption, transmission, and production which have become commonplace, daily activities. In the light of increased accessibility and interconnectivity in the digital age, which have such deep effects on our cultural, social and psychological selves, there is a renewed sense of urgency to re-view the ways in which we connect our selves with both the real and “virtual” worlds (and the one in between), so that we have a better sense of what it takes for us to regain a state of awareness and mindfulness in the midst of the exponentially growing world of information. 

With communication and learning channels networked on a global scale, it is easy to laud the participatory culture and open-access environment that the Internet offers. Social media, for instance, allows us to be connected to hundreds and thousands of people at once. When we log on to Facebook or Twitter, we are presented with live, streaming feeds of what others are doing and thinking about. Through hundreds of streaming feeds, we receive information and communicate with people at a rate previously unimagined when communication was restricted to telegrams or epistolary correspondences that involved one-on-one, rather than one-to-many exchanges. Today’s communication interfaces provide a sense of hyperconnectivity, but at what cost ?

Even when one is not plugged into the net, Mindful awareness remains an elusive state for many of us. In Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “it is as if, in our heads, each of us has a cassette tape that is always running, day and night. We think of this and we think of that, and it is difficult to stop. With a cassette, we can just press the stop button. But with our thinking we do not have any button.” It becomes increasingly challenging to press the stop or pause button when we are constantly fed with live streaming feeds of information and comments from the masses (while at the same time our senses bombarded by multimedia), and when our attention is divided into the multiple tabs in an Internet browser. Moreover, the Internet has become the machine that plays that cassette tape in our heads - a tape with infinite amounts of information stored on it. A tape that we constantly seek out. It is the “reception in a state of distraction” (to borrow Walter Benjamin’s phrase) that makes Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of mindfulness -- of being aware of what one is doing in the present moment and to “stop running” throughout our lives -- so important, so that even in the digital age of multimedia and information, we may be able, as Susan Sontag says, “to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

Are we really like the fish in Ajitpal Singh’s Empty in me, who “loves to believe that the bowl is the real ocean”? Do we “stray away from truth, and in turn, from the supreme soul,” with a search that is unending? Empty in me's exploration into the consciousness of human beings, as represented by the two friends and fish, is accompanied by an explosion of ethereal, transcendent, and beautiful visual images as well as trance sounds -- an attempt at, perhaps, recapturing what it might feel like to be spiritually liberated from the culture of excess, even as one is enclosed in a fishbowl. It is this vision of transcending cultural, social, and even physical limitations, that make Singh’s film a unique journey into the human consciousness and imagination.

In a recent motion picture produced by Terry Gilliam, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the film’s characters can tap into and roam their imaginations by entering a magical mirror in Doctor Parnassus’s caravan. It is only, however, when Doctor Parnassus (whose name is derived from the sacred Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses and sacred to the Greek gods) is in a trance that people can access the land of pure imagination, as guided by Doctor Parnassus’s mind.

Like Singh’s Empty in me, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a film that reminds us of the things we must continue to remember: beyond the world of information, bits and bytes, and accumulated knowledge, there is the world of “ens imaginarium,” as Immanuel Kant described it in Critique of Pure Reason: a world of pure intuition, space, and time -- the world of the imagination.

Michael Jones of the Huffington Post, too, recognizes that “Terry Gilliam uses Imaginarium to show that a much bigger world, a universe of possibility, exists beyond all of that [noise and excess of the 21st century].” Similarly, Empty in me takes us beyond mass culture and noise into a world that is bigger than the ocean itself -- even though our lives may, at times, feel like fishbowls, Singh’s film illustrates that the mind can take itself beyond the material and spiritual limitations into a space of color, light, sound, and magic. Thus, what Empty in me gives us is something that Sontag had advocated in the 1960’s: “an erotics of art” -- a concept that, perhaps, is more relevant now than ever as we inhabit the digital age of information and multimedia.

Paradoxically, even as the 21st century presents new challenges for our consciousness, attention, imagination, and mindfulness, the digital age also enables people to make use of the Internet and new media technologies in order to imagine a world beyond the flatness of print-based technologies. As Walter J. Ong writes, “The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge human spirit, set it free, intensify its interior life.” This investigation of the human spirit is what both Singh and Gilliam strive to render as a more fully experienced journey. At the same time, the world that the digital age offers is one that is increasingly challenging to navigate and have agency over, because of the sheer amount of information published on the Internet, linked to other websites, re-posted on other websites, and so on. Far from arguing against the richness of the twenty-first century culture of Web 2.0 technologies, I am, instead,  asserting the need for new sets of skills to face the ever-changing world of communication channels and knowledge production, as the proliferation of information continues. 

Singh’s Empty in Me ends with the two friends raising their hands towards the sky, as if in reverence of the higher power of contemplation, or of the sky itself. When they step out of the ocean (or the fishbowl, as represented artistically in the film and metaphorically speaking), their faces hold triumphant smiles, as though they have just been transformed, unlike the beginning of the film when their faces are more serious in thought. Even though the two friends assume, as the film description states, that the ocean is reality, and thus “stray away from truth,” their leap into the water also, eventually, signifies a form of spiritual purification. The explosive play of colors and fluidity of forms in the water, accompanied by the repetitive chanting and trance-like music, inspire the viewer as though he or she is given a glimpse into the subjective, internal experiences of the souls of these two DJs.

Singh, like Gilliam, also presents a larger world with infinite possibilities beyond -- and perhaps within -- the culture of excess and noise. It is only when we begin to “see more, to hear more, to feel more” with critical mindfulness that we may be driven towards our mind’s imaginarium that remains half-heartedly tapped. Perhaps, even as new media technologies demand new ways of seeing, listening, and being attentive, we may continue to strive towards a way of living so that we can “enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, set it free, intensify its interior life.”

Citations :

• Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Selected Writings.Ed. Jennings,

• Michael W. Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Print. 

• Jones, Michael. “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.” The Huffington Post. Posted January 22, 2010. Web.

• Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

• Nhat Hanh, Thich. Peace in Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. Print.

• Sontag, Susan. "Against Interpretation." Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 1966. Print.

• Trilling, Lionel. Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955. Print.